mining architecture stephanie white
globalisation suppy chains resources reuse
May 17, 2025
No matter what our personal belief system, we all grew up and practiced our trades in a rapacious capitalist system, and our cities are a reification of the display of capital power and domination. What are we to do with them? Given that the greenest building is the one already built, we must not demolish architecture because it is out of style, or out of programme, or out of wasteful materials. These buildings are great lumps of embedded energy, embedded carbon, embedded ambition. They must be re-configured, re-appropriated, re-claimed as built space that can be filled. I would like to forget all the considerations of their troubled politics, economics and ideology and simply look at them as material formations. I’d like to throw away the notion that configured space is tied indubitably to behavioural determinism. We thought this once; it was a strong part of my twentieth century education that well-designed space itself determined happiness or contentment, badly configured space made people confused and murderous. What if, instead, we treat existing buildings as materials to be mined; structures to be re-configured; programmed space to be ignored. They might be seen as something like land masses, islands of resources, limited by scarcity and isolation, which is, it is said, is our long-term global future.
If, hypothetically, but possibly not, we take the premise that the global trade system of the nineteenth, twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, whereby building materials travelled farther than most people did, where steel, timber, glass, aluminum, marble, concrete rarely were sourced locally, but imported from some other region, (i.e., Italy for all the coloured marble chips that made the spectacularly popular terrazo floors of the International Style of the twentieth century), we might see that there were inherent dependencies built into the global production and trade of building materials — dependencies held together by a loose agreement to specialise in one material, say steel for structure, knowing that someone else would provide the aluminum for the curtain wall. The universalism of modern construction transcended environment, geography, geology, human rights, economic advantage and disadvantage: anything was available anywhere if one had the will to order it. Economies of scale meant that although everywhere had a steel industry, or could make bricks, or could find the ingredients for concrete as all landmasses bordered seas and oceans at some time in deep history allowing for great strata of limestone formed from the calcium of small shells; although trees grew everywhere at one time, and all such materials made local building traditions, local architectures, all this was upended by trade and exchange. The industrial revolution changed trade and exchange from spice and silk, wool and linen, to industrial materials, transported at an industrial scale. Despite the predictions that the global rules of law for democratic ambitions, peace not war, trade and tariffs, the 80 year-old United Nations, NATO, World Health Organisation, UNESCO and numerous other goodwill efforts to balance power with obligation — despite the demise of all of this, or alternatively continuing on with all these structures without the willing wealth of the USA, power relations will still exist, land will still be seized, people will still die in wars, all in a more naked way than under the delusion that there actually was a world order. There was a ‘world’ order for the West, and with hegeomonic hubris, dubbed itself the only world worth dealing with.
1 As an example, Canada mines iron ore, processes it into steel (Fe+C)which is then sent to the USA as coils to be manufactured into profiles, such as I-beams, which are then sent back to Canada to be used in construction. It is more than exporting and re-importing raw iron, it is exporting and importing manufacturing capacity.
6 on site review 47 :: standing still
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